God's Book for Man's Intellect

The imagination of man will find its aliment. If high tilings and pure things are not within its reach, it will condescend to things of low estate. If it is not restrained, it will run riot; if it is not elevated by what is holy, it will be corrupted and debauched by what is base.

Here, as in everything else that is rational and right, God’s transcendent Word comes in with its ministrations to man’s necessities. It feeds the imagination with the loftiest sublimities, — with the purest and noblest conceptions of the beautiful. Let him who would expand, and elevate, and invigorate his imagination to the highest degree, go not to the creations of human fancy, to the drama of Greece, to the oratory of Rome, or to the romances of German genius. Let him turn away from the Iliad and the iEneid, from King Lear and Othello. Let him nurture his soul where John Milton fed before he gave existence to the immortal poem of Paradise. Let him contemplate those scenes which inspired a Bunyan to his matchless allegory, and taught Jeremy Taylor his hearse-like melodies. Let him listen to the lyre of David, and the rapt sublimities of Isaiah. Let him give ear to the mystic utterances of Habakkuk, and gaze on the gorgeous panoramas of the Apocalypse. Let him open his soul to that “oldest choral melody, the book of Job, so like the summer midnight with its seas and stars.”

god’s book. 31

Here is enough to stimulate the most torpid soul, enough to task the most aspiring intellect, enough to gratify the most fastidious taste, enough to satisfy the cravings of all created mind, whether human or angelic. Go to the Bible! ye who yearn for the beautiful and the ennobling, unmingled with the degmding and the poisonous. Spend your nightly studies on the word of Grod, man of taste, and lover of the lovely! N’owhere else will your intellectual hungerings be so fully satisfied. “While the King sitteth at His table. His spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof His plants are an orchard of pomegTanates with pleasant fruits; a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams out of Lebanon.”